telepresence robot

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pages: 301 words: 89,076

The Globotics Upheaval: Globalisation, Robotics and the Future of Work by Richard Baldwin

agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Apollo 11, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bread and circuses, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, commoditize, computer vision, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, data science, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, facts on the ground, Fairchild Semiconductor, future of journalism, future of work, George Gilder, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Hans Moravec, hiring and firing, hype cycle, impulse control, income inequality, industrial robot, intangible asset, Internet of things, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, low skilled workers, machine translation, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Metcalfe’s law, mirror neurons, new economy, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, post-work, profit motive, remote working, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, robotic process automation, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, standardized shipping container, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, telepresence, telepresence robot, telerobotics, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, universal basic income, warehouse automation

Believe it or not, the Heider-Simmel experiment tells us something about why telepresence robots are catching on fast. Many hospitals and some companies use telepresence robots already, and their use is growing rapidly since the impact on team interactions is palpable. The sense of being face-to-face is much stronger when the face moves, so to speak. In particular, doctors find that their words carry more authority with patients when they are talking via a telepresence robot instead of normal video Skype, or over the phone. While telepresence robots are useful for many interactions, a static form of telepresence technology is transforming the ease of holding meetings over long distances.

AR and VR are especially helpful in situations where two or more workers have to interact with something physical. But a great deal of work in offices depends upon regular meetings. As it turns out, digitech has created a marvelous substitute to actually being physically in the same room as other workers—it is called a telepresence robot. One company that is using it today is the online media site, Wired.com. TELEPRESENCE ROBOTS Emily Dreyfus writes for the San Francisco company Wired.com but lives in Boston. She used to participate remotely in staff meetings and bilaterals with her editor in the usual twentieth-century way—by phone, messages, and video conferences. But this wasn’t good enough for the spontaneous, creativity-enhancing brainstorming sessions that Wired was hoping for.

She used to participate remotely in staff meetings and bilaterals with her editor in the usual twentieth-century way—by phone, messages, and video conferences. But this wasn’t good enough for the spontaneous, creativity-enhancing brainstorming sessions that Wired was hoping for. Being a northern Californian sort of company, they decided to throw some digital technology at the problem. The tech took the form of a “telepresence robot” made by Double Robotics. The movements of the telepresence robot, which you can think of as Skype on wheels, are controlled by the writer in Boston, so the robot (in San Francisco) can wander around the office, attend meetings, hold one-on-one meetings, and so on. Picture the robot as a normal sized iPad on a stick with the stick attached to a Segway.


pages: 413 words: 119,587

Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots by John Markoff

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, AI winter, airport security, Andy Rubin, Apollo 11, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bill Atkinson, Bill Duvall, bioinformatics, Boston Dynamics, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, call centre, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Chris Urmson, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive load, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, dual-use technology, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, future of work, Galaxy Zoo, General Magic , Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, Gunnar Myrdal, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, haute couture, Herbert Marcuse, hive mind, hype cycle, hypertext link, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, Ivan Sutherland, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, John Conway, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kevin Kelly, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, loose coupling, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, medical residency, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Philippa Foot, pre–internet, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Richard Stallman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, semantic web, Seymour Hersh, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, skunkworks, Skype, social software, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, superintelligent machines, tech worker, technological singularity, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tenerife airport disaster, The Coming Technological Singularity, the medium is the message, Thorstein Veblen, Tony Fadell, trolley problem, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, zero-sum game

However, at the Page party, the Yaskawa robot had no apparent difficulty finding the party favor boxes, each of which contained a commemorative T-shirt. Ironically, humans had packed each of those boxes, because the robot was not yet able to handle loose shirts. The Industrial Perception arm wasn’t the only intelligent machine at the party. A telepresence robot was out on the dance floor, swaying to the music. It was midnight in Woodside, but Dean Kamen, the inventor of the Segway, was controlling the robot from New Hampshire—where it was now three A.M. This robot, dubbed a “Beam,” was from Suitable Technologies, another small start-up just a couple of blocks away from Industrial Perception.

Hassan had been the original programmer of the Google search engine while it was still a Stanford research project. Willow Garage was his effort to build a humanoid robot as a research platform. The company had developed a freely available operating system for robotics as well as a humanoid telepresence robot, PR2, that was being used in a number of universities. That evening, both AI and IA technologies were thus in attendance at Page’s party—one of the robots attempted to replace humans while another attempted to augment them. Later that year Google acquired Industrial Perception, the box-handling company, for Rubin’s new robot empire.

The iPod and the iPhone were the first examples of this transition as a reimagining of the phonograph and the telephone. Augmented reality would also make the idea of telepresence far more compelling. Two people separated by great distance could gain the illusion of sharing the same space. This would be a radical improvement on today’s videoconferencing and awkward telepresence robots like Scott Hassan’s Beam, which place a human face on a mobile robot. Gary Bradski left the world of robots to join Abovitz’s effort to build what will potentially become the most intimate and powerful augmentation technology. Now he spends his days refining computer vision technologies to fundamentally remake computing in a human-centered way.


pages: 385 words: 111,113

Augmented: Life in the Smart Lane by Brett King

23andMe, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 11, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, business intelligence, business process, call centre, chief data officer, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, clean water, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, congestion charging, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, different worldview, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, distributed ledger, double helix, drone strike, electricity market, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fellow of the Royal Society, fiat currency, financial exclusion, Flash crash, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, future of work, gamification, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, gigafactory, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Lippershey, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the telephone, invention of the wheel, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job-hopping, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Leonard Kleinrock, lifelogging, low earth orbit, low skilled workers, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Metcalfe’s law, Minecraft, mobile money, money market fund, more computing power than Apollo, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off grid, off-the-grid, packet switching, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Ray Kurzweil, retail therapy, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart transportation, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social graph, software as a service, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, synthetic biology, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, TED Talk, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Travis Kalanick, TSMC, Turing complete, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, uber lyft, undersea cable, urban sprawl, V2 rocket, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white picket fence, WikiLeaks, yottabyte

Telemedicine robots are also making a huge impact on the future of medicine in hospitals and at home. The first telepresence robot that received FDA approval is being rolled out, literally, in hospitals around the country. The RP-VITA telepresence robot is a joint venture from InTouch Health Systems and iRobot. The ability for healthcare professionals to be able to move around in chaotic environments like hospitals and visit patients regardless of geography is creating efficiencies that will lead to that nostalgic nirvana of doctor house calls. Combine self-driving cars and these types of telepresence robots, and a new paradigm in health care is born as doctorbots can just call an Uber to make 20 to 30 house calls a day.


pages: 484 words: 104,873

Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future by Martin Ford

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, artificial general intelligence, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bernie Madoff, Bill Joy: nanobots, bond market vigilante , business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computer age, creative destruction, data science, debt deflation, deep learning, deskilling, digital divide, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, financial innovation, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, Freestyle chess, full employment, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gunnar Myrdal, High speed trading, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, large language model, liquidity trap, low interest rates, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, McJob, moral hazard, Narrative Science, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, optical character recognition, passive income, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, precision agriculture, price mechanism, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, rent-seeking, reshoring, RFID, Richard Feynman, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Salesforce, Sam Peltzman, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, strong AI, Stuxnet, technological singularity, telepresence, telepresence robot, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, union organizing, Vernor Vinge, very high income, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce

By the same token, it is easy to envision remote-controlled machinery being operated by offshore workers who provide the visual perception and dexterity that, for the time being, continues to elude autonomous robots. A need for face-to-face interaction is another factor that is assumed to anchor a job locally. However, telepresence robots are pushing the frontier in this area and have already been used to offshore English language instruction from Korean schools to the Philippines. In the not too distant future, advanced virtual reality environments will likewise make it even easier for workers to move seamlessly across national borders and engage directly with customers or clients.

The suits lease for just under $2,000 per year and are already in use at over three hundred Japanese hospitals and nursing homes.21 Other near-term developments will probably include robotic walkers to assist in mobility and inexpensive robots capable of bringing medicine, providing a glass of water, or retrieving commonly misplaced items like eyeglasses. (This would likely be done by attaching RFID tags to the items.) Robots that can help track and monitor people with dementia are also appearing. Telepresence robots that allow doctors or caretakers to interact with patients remotely are already in use in some hospitals and care facilities. Devices of this type are relatively easy to develop because they skirt around the challenge of dexterity. The near-term nursing-care robotics story is primarily going to be about machines that assist, monitor, or enable communication.

., 37 Teamsters Union, 17 techno-feudalism, 204n, 266 technological change/progress economic growth and, 65 productivity and, 33 S-curves of, 66–67, 68 skill biased, 48 welfare of American workforce and, x technology disruptive, xviii, 66 golden era of, 51 graying workforce and, 220–223 historical narrative of modern, 51–58 investment in labor-saving, 227–228 manufacturing jobs and, 55 relationship between employment and, 175–176 unskilled worker wages and, 208–209 Tegmark, Max, 229, 237 telepresence robots, 119–120, 157 Terminator movies, 22, 157n Tesla, 3 textile industry, US, 8–9 Thatcher, Margaret, 258 “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom” (Feynman), 241 Thiel, Peter, 64, 236 thinking machine, 229–233. See also Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) 3D printing, 176, 177–181 three-dimensional chips, 70, 70n Thrun, Sebastian, 132, 133, 134, 135, 139, 182, 256 Time (magazine), 111, 160, 191, 235 Tokyo University entrance exam, creating artificial intelligence system to pass, 127–128 Toys “R” Us, 17 tragedy of the commons problem, 265 Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever (Kurzweil & Grossmann), 235 Transits—Into an Abyss (Iamus), 111 translation tools, 89–90, 120–121, 130 Triple Revolution report, 30–31, 250 trucks, automated, 190–191 Tunisia, 46 Turing, Alan, 80, 230 TurtleBot, 7 “21st Century Nanotechnology Research and Development Act,” 242 Twitter, 114 2001: A Space Odyssey (film), 157n Uber, 191, 209n Udacity, 133, 134–135, 142 underemployment, xvi, 49, 126 unemployment consumer behavior and, 211 education/job retraining and, 249–250 environmental effects of fear of, 283–284 long-term, ix, xvi, 45–46, 211, 280 machines and, ix–x rates of, 33, 41, 44–45, 172, 211–212, 249, 250, 276 youth, 221 unions, decline in power of, 57–58 United Auto Workers, 193 United States college graduates overqualified for occupations in, 251 consumer spending in, 54 economic stagnation in, 65 elder care in, 155 health care as precent of economy, 146 immigration policy and automated agriculture in, 26 income inequality in, 46–48 job-market polarization in, 49–51 taxpayer funding of basic information technology research in, 80–81 textile industry, 8–9 universal health coverage, 279 universal translator, offshoring and, 121 University of Akron, 141 University of Alabama, 141 University of California system, 140 University of California, Berkeley, Labor Center 14 University of Michigan, MOOCs and, 133, 137 University of Missouri, 141 University of Pennsylvania, MOOCs and, 133–134 University of Wisconsin, 138, 142 Urban Institute, 46 Urmson, Chris, 183–184 U-Systems, Inc., 152 value-added tax (VAT), 272–273 Vardakostas, Alexandros, 12–13 VAT.


pages: 523 words: 61,179

Human + Machine: Reimagining Work in the Age of AI by Paul R. Daugherty, H. James Wilson

3D printing, AI winter, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, blockchain, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, circular economy, cloud computing, computer vision, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, digital twin, disintermediation, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, friendly AI, fulfillment center, future of work, Geoffrey Hinton, Hans Moravec, industrial robot, Internet of things, inventory management, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, knowledge worker, Lyft, machine translation, Marc Benioff, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, personalized medicine, precision agriculture, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, robotic process automation, Rodney Brooks, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sensor fusion, sentiment analysis, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Snow Crash, software as a service, speech recognition, tacit knowledge, telepresence, telepresence robot, text mining, the scientific method, uber lyft, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics

While this might help explain why customers could on occasion have to wait hours (or days) to get their cars fixed, it does little to ease their frustrations. So, what’s the best way to train mechanics, and is there a better way to deploy expert technicians to remote dealerships to minimize customer wait times? Audi found the answer through co-creation in the missing middle. The company deployed a fleet of telepresence robots called Audi Robotic Telepresence (ART) that not only helps train technicians in diagnostics and repair, but also speeds up the time it takes to make repairs in the first place. It’s an example of employee amplification along with AI-enabled training, combined into a whole new process. With ART, the expert technician doesn’t need to travel; instead, his or her voice and face are beamed across miles and emitted from ART’s speakers and high-resolution display.

See marketing and sales Salesforce, 85–86, 196 Samsung, 96–97 Samuel, Arthur, 41, 60 scale, 160 Schaefer, Markus, 148 scheduling agents, 196 Schnur, Steve, 194 scientific method, 69–77 hypotheses in, 72–74 observation in, 69–72 testing in, 74–77 SEB, 55–56, 59, 143–145, 160 second wave of business transformation, 5, 19, 47 security, IT, 56–58 semi-supervised learning, 62 Sensabot, 192 sensors in agriculture, 35–37 product development and, 29 retail shopping, 160–165 in robotic arms, 24–26 sentiment tracking, 176 SEW-Eurodrive, 149 Shah, Julie, 120 Shah, Uman, 98 Shannon, Claude, 40 Siemens, 23, 210 Sight Machine, 27 SigOpt, 77 Siri, 11, 96–97, 118, 146 6sense, 92 skills amplification of, 7 developing, 15–16 fusion, 12, 15–16, 181, 183–206 human vs. machine, 20–21, 105–106, 151 in manufacturing, 38 in marketing and sales, 100 in R&D, 83 Slack, 196 smart glasses, 143 smart mirrors, 87–88, 100 social media, 98, 176 software design, AI-enabled, 3 generative design, 135–137, 139, 141 Sophie, 119 SparkCognition, 58 speech recognition, 66 speech to text, 64 Spiegel, Eric, 210 Standup Bot, 196 State Farm, 99 Steele, Billy, 76 Stitch Fix, 110–111, 152, 204 Store No. 8, 162 Summer Olympics, 98 supervised learning, 60 supply chains, 19–39 data, 12, 15 sustaining, 107, 114–115, 179 jobs in, 126–132 See also missing middle S Voice, 96–97 Swedberg, Claire, 31 symbiosis, 7–8 symbol-based systems, 24, 41 Symbotic, 32–33 symmetry, 130 Systematica, 167 task performance training, 116 Tatsu, 196 Tay, 168–169 Taylor, Harriet, 91 telepresence robots, 159 Tempo, 176 Tesla, 67–68, 83, 190 testing, 74–77 Texas Medical Center, 178 Textio, 196 text recognition, 66 third wave transformation, 4–6 adaptive processes in, 19–21 time, rehumanizing, 12, 186–189 time-and-motion analyses, 4 Toyota Research Institute, 166 training/retraining, 15, 107, 114–115, 208 augmentation in, 143 auto technicians, 158–160 crowdsourcing/outsourcing, 120–121 curriculum development for, 178–179 data for, 121–122 education for AI, 132–133 empathy, 117–118 employee willingness toward, 185 feedback loops in, 174 for fusion skills, 211–213 holistic melding and, 200–201 human expertise and, 194–195 interaction modeling, 120 jobs in training AI systems, 100, 114–122 personality, 118–119 reciprocal apprenticing and, 12, 201–202 worldview and localization, 119–120 See also missing middle transparency, 213 transparency analysts, 125 trust of machines vs. humans, 166–168, 172–173 moral crumple zones and, 169–172 Twitter, 168–169 Uber, 44, 95, 169 uncanny valley, 116 Unilever, 51–52 Universal Robotics, 23 University of Ottawa, 70 University of Pennsylvania, 167 University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC), 188 unmanned vehicles, 28 unsupervised learning, 61–62 US Department of Justice, 45 user interfaces, 140 user needs, discovering, 156 V8, 98 Vallaeys, Frederick, 99 Vectra, 58 vehicle design anthropologists, 113–114 vehicles, autonomous, 67–68, 166–167, 189, 190 Vertesi, Janet, 201 vertical farms, 36 video recognition, 66 Virgin Trains, 47–48, 50, 59 vision.


pages: 993 words: 318,161

Fall; Or, Dodge in Hell by Neal Stephenson

Ada Lovelace, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, bitcoin, blockchain, cloud computing, coherent worldview, computer vision, crisis actor, crossover SUV, cryptocurrency, defense in depth, demographic transition, distributed ledger, drone strike, easy for humans, difficult for computers, fake news, false flag, game design, gamification, index fund, Jaron Lanier, life extension, messenger bag, microaggression, microbiome, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, no-fly zone, off grid, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, planetary scale, ride hailing / ride sharing, sensible shoes, short selling, Silicon Valley, Snow Crash, tech bro, telepresence, telepresence robot, telerobotics, The Hackers Conference, Turing test, Works Progress Administration

Its office chair had long since been poached, leaving more room for boxes of office supplies that tended to pile up there. Guests didn’t sit around the coffee table waiting to be buzzed in; their hosts knew where they were, and vice versa. The door leading back into the offices was propped open. Stationed next to it, plugged into a wall outlet, were charging docks for two different brands of telepresence robots: wheeled contraptions sporting flat-panel monitors thrust into the air at about the altitude of a person’s head, capable of purring around the office under the control of persons who weren’t physically present but who had the right passwords, and the right software installed on their systems.

Halfway through the talk, though, the robot stepped forward and walked up the length of the hall to a position where it could get a clearer view. El’s boys woke up and took notice. No one really knew for certain, but it was generally assumed that the robot—a telepresence device meant to serve as the sensorium of a person not physically in attendance—was being controlled from Europe by Elmo Shepherd. Early telepresence robots had just stood there stolidly when not moving, like statues; this one was more elegant. Even when it wasn’t going anywhere it never stopped making minute shifts in its attitude, transferring its weight from foot to foot and turning its head toward sound and movement. Its head was a prolate spheroid, matte gray and featureless except for a few tiny holes for cameras and microphones.

He’d sent signals that he would spend every penny he had defending himself in court. And everyone understood that by the time he could be tried, convicted, and sentenced, he’d be dead, or so mentally disabled that any sentence would be commuted on humanitarian grounds. He stayed home and he used telepresence robots to “travel” around the world, and he disabled their faces so that no one could “see” him. He’d become a sort of Man in the Iron Mask. A little less than a year after the conference in the San Juan Islands, Corvallis Kawasaki—who was in Amsterdam on other business—rented a car and had it drive him down to the border.


pages: 360 words: 100,991

Heart of the Machine: Our Future in a World of Artificial Emotional Intelligence by Richard Yonck

3D printing, AI winter, AlphaGo, Apollo 11, artificial general intelligence, Asperger Syndrome, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, backpropagation, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, brain emulation, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, deep learning, DeepMind, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Fairchild Semiconductor, friendly AI, Geoffrey Hinton, ghettoisation, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of writing, Jacques de Vaucanson, job automation, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, Loebner Prize, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, mirror neurons, Neil Armstrong, neurotypical, Nick Bostrom, Oculus Rift, old age dependency ratio, pattern recognition, planned obsolescence, pneumatic tube, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, Skype, social intelligence, SoftBank, software as a service, SQL injection, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, technological singularity, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, theory of mind, Turing test, twin studies, Two Sigma, undersea cable, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Review, working-age population, zero day

In early 2015 METI published their new five-year government plan, “New Strategy for Robots,” which allocated nearly 5.3 billion yen to the use of robots in the nursing and medicine sector.4 Caretaker robots fall into one of a number of categories: • Rehabilitation robots used for physical therapy purposes, including robo-prosthetics for people with muscular motor issues, such as the loss of muscle control that can occur following a stroke. • Telepresence robots that aid in distance communications, monitoring, and promoting social interaction. • Service robots capable of providing direct care. Some of these robots may carry heavy items or even the patients themselves. Others can act as a form of external memory, helping users remember important items or engage them in exercises that help promote better memory.

See transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) technium, 23 technological evolution “AI-human symbiote,” 264 emotional empathy and, 265–266 and “ end of the world” scenarios, 261–262 and the future, 266–273 intention, 260–261 Matrix scenario, 262–263 peaceful coexistence, 263 technological singularity, 239 technophobia, 29–30 TEDWomen, 175–176 Tega, 118–119 Tegmark, Max, 132 teledildonic devices, 188–189 telepresence, 201 telepresence robots, 151 Terminator scenarios, 242, 262 Terror Management Theory (TMT), 99 Terrorist Surveillance Act (2006), 145 Texas A&M, 127 theory of mind (ToM), 83–84, 131 therapeutic companion robots, 148–150 “Three Laws of Robotics,” 165, 230–233, 262 3D printing, 211 Tilbury, Nancy, 57 TMS. See transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) Tobii, 73 ToM.


Robot Futures by Illah Reza Nourbakhsh

3D printing, autonomous vehicles, Burning Man, business logic, commoditize, computer vision, digital divide, Mars Rover, Menlo Park, phenotype, Skype, social intelligence, software as a service, stealth mode startup, strong AI, telepresence, telepresence robot, Therac-25, Turing test, Vernor Vinge

The real problem with this speculative line of discussion is that talk of mind duplication and immortality is not just too distant and too frightening—it is also desperately exciting and inspiring. Stories of technological utopia decades or centuries in the future do not solve the problems we face today, nor do they help us guide the development of technology in the near term for the best possible human good. The near future of telepresence, robotics, and communications technologies threatens to distract us, dehumanize our interactions, and erode our personal freedom and choice. The true challenge we face is in charting a new course that instead celebrates and nourishes individual well-being, accountability, and societal equity. To chart such a course we should become more deliberate and considered as we imagine and design technologies that carry us forward. 6 Which Robot Future?


pages: 237 words: 74,109

Uncanny Valley: A Memoir by Anna Wiener

autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, basic income, behavioural economics, Blitzscaling, blockchain, blood diamond, Burning Man, call centre, charter city, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark triade / dark tetrad, data science, digital divide, digital nomad, digital rights, end-to-end encryption, Extropian, functional programming, future of work, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, growth hacking, guns versus butter model, housing crisis, Jane Jacobs, job automation, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, means of production, medical residency, microaggression, microapartment, microdosing, new economy, New Urbanism, Overton Window, passive income, Plato's cave, pull request, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Social Justice Warrior, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, special economic zone, subprime mortgage crisis, systems thinking, tech bro, tech worker, technoutopianism, telepresence, telepresence robot, union organizing, universal basic income, unpaid internship, urban planning, urban renewal, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce, work culture , Y2K, young professional

Meetings were held over videoconferencing software, and people dialed in from wherever they happened to be: public transportation, pool loungers, unmade beds, living rooms with partners napping in the background. An engineer attended his daily stand-up meeting from an indoor climbing wall, gripping a plastic rock and wearing a harness. A telepresence robot rolled around the first-floor event space, lanky and conspicuous, a bridge between worlds. People came and went, operating on individualized schedules. I never knew whom I would run into at HQ, or whether I would be working alone. On every floor were mounted television screens displaying heat maps, and lists of employee avatars indicating who was in the building and where.


pages: 256 words: 73,068

12 Bytes: How We Got Here. Where We Might Go Next by Jeanette Winterson

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alignment Problem, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Graeber, deep learning, deskilling, digital rights, discovery of DNA, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake news, flying shuttle, friendly AI, gender pay gap, global village, Grace Hopper, Gregor Mendel, hive mind, housing crisis, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, lockdown, lone genius, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, microdosing, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, off grid, OpenAI, operation paperclip, packet switching, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, Plato's cave, public intellectual, QAnon, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, SpaceX Starlink, speech recognition, spinning jenny, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, TikTok, trade route, Turing test, universal basic income, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, Y Combinator

In April 2021, Facebook rolled out updated avatars for their Oculus VR system that allow for a quintillion combinations, so you can represent yourself in VR the way you want to. 5G broadband and 4-8K video will allow for speed and visual complexity. International travel is expensive for companies, and bad for the planet – a real sense of being in another place could change how we do business. Telepresence robots allow you to beam your face into their screen, chat with others at the location, and physically move around an office complex or factory – if you need to inspect some merchandise, for instance. The bot moves autonomously. Ava Robotics have seen a surge in sales from high-end reale-state agents since Covid, as the bot can ‘walk’ through a large property or estate, with the potential buyer ‘inside’ the bot, in real time, taking a proper look at what is on offer


pages: 677 words: 206,548

Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It by Marc Goodman

23andMe, 3D printing, active measures, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, Brian Krebs, business process, butterfly effect, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, Cody Wilson, cognitive dissonance, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, don't be evil, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, future of work, game design, gamification, global pandemic, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, Hacker News, high net worth, High speed trading, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, hypertext link, illegal immigration, impulse control, industrial robot, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, Large Hadron Collider, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, license plate recognition, lifelogging, litecoin, low earth orbit, M-Pesa, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mobile money, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, national security letter, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off grid, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, operational security, optical character recognition, Parag Khanna, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, personalized medicine, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, printed gun, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ross Ulbricht, Russell Brand, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, security theater, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, Stuxnet, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, tech worker, technological singularity, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, uranium enrichment, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wave and Pay, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, web application, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, you are the product, zero day

Thousands of Paro units have been sold globally, and they have proven particularly useful with advanced dementia patients in reducing levels of violence and improving mood. Recognizing the market need for elder-care robots, iRobot (maker of vacuums and killer bots) has opened a new division specifically to serve seniors. One of the fastest-growing types of elder-care bots are telepresence robots—machines that allow people to “move virtually through a distant building by remotely controlling a wheeled robot equipped with a camera, microphone, loudspeaker and screen displaying live video” of the person’s face controlling the bot over the Internet. Robots such as the MantaroBot and the EU’s GiraffPlus allow children to “beam in” from thousands of miles away and remotely drive a wheeled bot with an iPad-type face in order to interact with aging parents.

With the push of a button on an iPad, a doctor across town or around the world can direct the robot to the patient’s bedside, zoom in on his pupils, and even have a nurse place a stethoscope on his chest to remotely hear his heartbeat. Whether robots have better bedside manner is yet to be determined. Businesses too are starting to realize the value of having telepresence robots in the office, allowing employees to abstract their physical presence through remotely controlled devices. Companies such as Suitable Technologies and Double Robotics have models that cost around $3,000 and allow employees to work from home while their robotic alter egos wander the hallways at the office, walk up to colleagues at their desks, or catch up on all the latest gossip in the lunchroom.


pages: 292 words: 85,151

Exponential Organizations: Why New Organizations Are Ten Times Better, Faster, and Cheaper Than Yours (And What to Do About It) by Salim Ismail, Yuri van Geest

23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, anti-fragile, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, Ben Horowitz, bike sharing, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, book value, Burning Man, business intelligence, business process, call centre, chief data officer, Chris Wanstrath, circular economy, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, commoditize, corporate social responsibility, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fail fast, game design, gamification, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, gravity well, hiring and firing, holacracy, Hyperloop, industrial robot, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, Internet of things, Iridium satellite, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, lifelogging, loose coupling, loss aversion, low earth orbit, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Max Levchin, means of production, Michael Milken, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, NetJets, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, offshore financial centre, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, prediction markets, profit motive, publish or perish, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, social software, software is eating the world, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, the long tail, Tony Hsieh, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, urban planning, Virgin Galactic, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, X Prize, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Although videoconferencing was quite a hassle in the past, an organization can now leverage services such as Skype and Google Hangout, which are fast, easy to use and available on every device. Telepresence enables employees to work proactively from any location and interact on a global scale, reducing travel costs and improving well-being. Even greater improvement comes from Telepresence robots such as Beam, from Suitable Technologies, and Double Robotics, which leverage the user’s tablet. These robots even allow the user to be on multiple locations at once, which can greatly impact how to conduct business. While Telepresence lets people interact in a real environment, virtual reality allows interaction, collaboration, coordination and even prototyping in a virtual world.


pages: 337 words: 93,245

Diaspora by Greg Egan

conceptual framework, cosmic abundance, cosmic microwave background, Fermat's Last Theorem, gravity well, Jacquard loom, stem cell, telepresence, telepresence robot, Turing machine

Moving about in public 5-scapes still made Orlando intensely self-conscious, less out of any fear of falling flat on his face than from a strong sense that he could take no credit for the fact that he didn't. His 5-body came equipped with numerous invaluable reflexes, as any real macrospherean body almost certainly would, but relying on these alien instincts made him feel like he was operating a telepresence robot programmed with so many autonomous responses that any instructions he gave it would be superfluous. He glanced down at the bottom of the window. The most trivial details in a 5-scape could still be hypnotic; the tesseract of the window met the tesseract of the floor along, not a line, but a roughly cubical volume.


pages: 294 words: 96,661

The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity by Byron Reese

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Apollo 11, artificial general intelligence, basic income, bread and circuses, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, business process, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, cognitive bias, computer age, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, dark matter, DeepMind, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Eratosthenes, estate planning, financial independence, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, flying shuttle, full employment, Hans Moravec, Hans Rosling, income inequality, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, James Hargreaves, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, lateral thinking, life extension, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Lou Jepsen, Moravec's paradox, Nick Bostrom, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, OpenAI, pattern recognition, profit motive, quantum entanglement, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Rodney Brooks, Sam Altman, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, technological singularity, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, Timothy McVeigh, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Von Neumann architecture, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, Y Combinator

Artificial limbs have been developed that are controlled by the brain. We will soon 3-D print new veins and arteries, and within a decade, replacement organs, such as the liver. Rehab robotic limbs allow someone to gradually regain the use of her or her arms and legs by gradually dialing down how much assistance they provide. Telepresence robots that allow doctors to virtually diagnose someone anywhere in the world are already a thing. Computer-controlled lasers are doing surgeries no human hand could perform. A company in the Netherlands has developed a pill that can travel to a certain part of the body to deliver its medicinal payload.


pages: 368 words: 96,825

Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World by Peter H. Diamandis, Steven Kotler

3D printing, additive manufacturing, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Apollo 11, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Boston Dynamics, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, company town, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deal flow, deep learning, dematerialisation, deskilling, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Exxon Valdez, fail fast, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, Firefox, Galaxy Zoo, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, gravity well, hype cycle, ImageNet competition, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, Jono Bacon, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, meta-analysis, microbiome, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Narrative Science, Netflix Prize, Network effects, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, optical character recognition, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, performance metric, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, rolodex, Scaled Composites, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart grid, SpaceShipOne, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, superconnector, Susan Wojcicki, synthetic biology, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, Turing test, urban renewal, Virgin Galactic, Wayback Machine, web application, X Prize, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

In the aftermath of these reports, Foxconn’s president, Terry Gou, said he intended to replace one million workers with robots over the next three years.54 Besides replacing our blue-collar workforce, over the next three to five years, robots will invade a much wider assortment of fields. “Already,” says Dan Barry, “we’re seeing telepresence robots transport our eyes, ears, arms, and legs to conferences and meetings. Autonomous cars, which are, after all, just robots, will [start to] chauffeur people around and deliver goods and services. Over the next decade, robots will also move into health care, replacing doctors for routine surgeries and supplementing nurses for eldercare.


pages: 397 words: 110,130

Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better by Clive Thompson

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Andy Carvin, augmented reality, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Benjamin Mako Hill, butterfly effect, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, compensation consultant, conceptual framework, context collapse, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, Deng Xiaoping, digital rights, discovery of penicillin, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, drone strike, Edward Glaeser, Edward Thorp, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, experimental subject, Filter Bubble, folksonomy, Freestyle chess, Galaxy Zoo, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Henri Poincaré, hindsight bias, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, Ian Bogost, information retrieval, iterative process, James Bridle, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge worker, language acquisition, lifelogging, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Netflix Prize, Nicholas Carr, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, patent troll, pattern recognition, pre–internet, public intellectual, Richard Feynman, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Socratic dialogue, spaced repetition, superconnector, telepresence, telepresence robot, The future is already here, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, Two Sigma, Vannevar Bush, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, X Prize, éminence grise

At MIT’s Media Lab, the students are required to show off their new projects on Demo Day, with an audience of interested spectators and corporate sponsors. For years the unofficial credo was “demo or die”: if your project didn’t work as intended, you died (much as stand-up comedians “die” on stage when their act bombs). I’ve attended a few of these events and watched as some poor student’s telepresence robot freezes up and crashes . . . and the student’s desperate, white-faced hand waving begins. When you walk around meditating on an idea quietly to yourself, you do a lot of hand waving. It’s easy to win an argument inside your head. But when you face a real audience, as Weinberg points out, the hand waving has to end.


pages: 480 words: 123,979

Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters With Reality and Virtual Reality by Jaron Lanier

4chan, air gap, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, carbon footprint, cloud computing, collaborative editing, commoditize, Computer Lib, cosmological constant, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, deep learning, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, game design, general-purpose programming language, gig economy, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, Howard Rheingold, hype cycle, impulse control, information asymmetry, intentional community, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kuiper Belt, lifelogging, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, Murray Gell-Mann, Neal Stephenson, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, peak TV, Plato's cave, profit motive, Project Xanadu, quantum cryptography, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skinner box, Skype, Snapchat, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Thorstein Veblen, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons

Nothing to fear. 20. 1992, Out MicroCosm 1992 was the year when everything changed. Within VPL the year started just as I pleased, with an exotic torrent of activity. Wonderful projects: We connected people in Germany, California, and Japan in live, shared, virtual worlds and also got them to inhabit telepresence robots across continents. We slaved a robot hand to an avatar hand with enough grace to pick up surgical tools. Surgical simulation was extended to the brain. VPL had an ambitious secret project under way in the early 1990s called MicroCosm. This was to be the first self-contained VR system. For a base unit, it had tracking sensors and a PC with all manner of special cards embedded within a pretty, curvy plastic sculpture.


pages: 474 words: 130,575

Surveillance Valley: The Rise of the Military-Digital Complex by Yasha Levine

23andMe, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Anne Wojcicki, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, Californian Ideology, call centre, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, collaborative editing, colonial rule, company town, computer age, computerized markets, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, digital map, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, fault tolerance, gentrification, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global village, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Hangouts, Greyball, Hacker Conference 1984, Howard Zinn, hypertext link, IBM and the Holocaust, index card, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Laura Poitras, life extension, Lyft, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), packet switching, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, private military company, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, slashdot, Snapchat, Snow Crash, SoftBank, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telepresence, telepresence robot, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Hackers Conference, Tony Fadell, uber lyft, vertical integration, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks

He was simply reaffirming what he had told journalists back in 2013: “Let us speak no more of faith in man, but bind him down from mischief by chains of cryptography.”65 Snowden’s call to arms was taken up by people all over the world: Silicon Valley companies, privacy groups, corporate think tanks and lobbyists, political activists, and thousands of eager techies around the globe. Even Google’s Sergey Brin posed for a selfie with the infamous leaker—or the video-equipped “telepresence” robot that Snowden used to speak at conferences for him.66 Thanks to Snowden, the privacy movement was going mainstream, and the Tor Project was at the center of it all. No matter where you turned in the privacy world, people were united in their admiration for Tor as a solution to surveillance on the Internet.


pages: 420 words: 135,569

Imaginable: How to See the Future Coming and Feel Ready for Anything―Even Things That Seem Impossible Today by Jane McGonigal

2021 United States Capitol attack, Airbnb, airport security, Alvin Toffler, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, basic income, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, circular economy, clean water, climate change refugee, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Community Supported Agriculture, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, data science, decarbonisation, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, fake news, fiat currency, future of work, Future Shock, game design, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Greta Thunberg, income inequality, index card, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, lockdown, longitudinal study, Mason jar, mass immigration, meta-analysis, microbiome, Minecraft, moral hazard, open borders, pattern recognition, place-making, plant based meat, post-truth, QAnon, QR code, remote working, RFID, risk tolerance, School Strike for Climate, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social distancing, stem cell, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, The future is already here, TikTok, traumatic brain injury, universal basic income, women in the workforce, work culture , Y Combinator

But when my colleague Dylan Hendricks took over the role of planning the annual event, he had a suggestion: we should invite teenagers to attend. Ten years from now, today’s teenagers will be helping to shape society. Why not give them a seat at the table now? In 2016, twenty teenagers were invited to attend the Ten-Year Forecast conference, in person or by remote-controlled Beam telepresence robots. We let them tell all of us what they were excited about, and what they were worried about, for the future. Twenty out of 1.2 billion young people is a very small start. But that’s the best way to start—small, so that nothing will stop you, so that you actually do something and not only imagine it.


pages: 798 words: 240,182

The Transhumanist Reader by Max More, Natasha Vita-More

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, Bill Joy: nanobots, bioinformatics, brain emulation, Buckminster Fuller, cellular automata, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, combinatorial explosion, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, cosmological principle, data acquisition, discovery of DNA, Douglas Engelbart, Drosophila, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, experimental subject, Extropian, fault tolerance, Flynn Effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, friendly AI, Future Shock, game design, germ theory of disease, Hans Moravec, hypertext link, impulse control, index fund, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lifelogging, Louis Pasteur, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, moral hazard, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, Pepto Bismol, phenotype, positional goods, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, presumed consent, Project Xanadu, public intellectual, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, reversible computing, RFID, Ronald Reagan, scientific worldview, silicon-based life, Singularitarianism, social intelligence, stem cell, stochastic process, superintelligent machines, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technological determinism, technological singularity, Ted Nelson, telepresence, telepresence robot, telerobotics, the built environment, The Coming Technological Singularity, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, Upton Sinclair, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture, VTOL, Whole Earth Review, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

One might imagine a hybrid system where a virtual “central station” is surrounded by portals that open on to views of multiplereal locations. While in the station one inhabits a simulated body, but when one steps through a portal, the harness link is seamlessly switched from the simulation to a telepresence robot waiting at that location. The technical challenges limit the availability, “fidelity,” and affordability of telepresence and virtual reality systems today – in fact, they exist only in a few highly experimental demonstrations. But progress is being made, and it’s possible to anticipate a time, a few decades hence, when people spend more time in remote and virtual realities than in their immediate ­surroundings, just as today most of us spend more time in artificial indoor surroundings than in the great outdoors.